We Are for the Dark - 1987–90 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Seven

by Robert Silverberg

  We Are for the Dark © 2012 by Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Interior design © 2012 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition

  978-1-59606-501-7

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “The Dead Man’s Eyes” first appeared in Playboy, August 1988.

  “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1989.

  “To the Promised Land” first appeared in Omni, May 1989.

  “Chip Runner” first appeared in The Microverse, November 1989, edited by Byron Preiss.

  “A Sleep and a Forgetting” first appeared in Playboy, July 1989.

  “In Another Country” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1989.

  “The Asenion Solution” first appeared in Foundation’s Friends: Stories in Honor of Isaac Asimov, September 1989, edited by Martin H. Greenberg.

  “We Are for the Dark” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1988.

  “Lion Time in Timbuctoo” was first published by Axolotl Press, May 1990.

  “A Tip on a Turtle” first appeared in Amazing Stories, May 1991.

  Copyright © 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, by Agberg, Ltd.

  Introductions Copyright © Agberg, Ltd., 2012

  Illustrations are reproduced from source text of first publication or as from indicated above.

  For Alice K. Turner

  Gardner Dozois

  Ellen Datlow

  Byron Preiss

  Martin H. Greenberg

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kim Mohan

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Dead Man’s Eyes

  Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another

  To The Promised Land

  Chip Runner

  A Sleep and a Forgetting

  In Another Country

  The Asenion Solution

  We Are for the Dark

  Lion Time in Timbuctoo

  A Tip on a Turtle

  INTRODUCTION

  A couple of working definitions:

  1) A short story is a piece of prose fiction in which just one significant thing happens.

  2) A science-fiction short story is a piece of prose fiction in which just one extraordinary thing happens.

  These are not definitions of my devising, nor are they especially recent. The first was formulated by Edgar Allan Poe more than a century and a half ago, and the second by H.G. Wells about fifty years after that. Neither one is an absolute commandment: it’s quite possible to violate one or both of these definitions and still produce a story that will fascinate its readers. But they’re good working rules, and I’ve tried to keep them in mind throughout my writing career.

  What Poe spoke of, actually, was the “single effect” that every story should create. Each word in the story, he said, should work towards that effect. That might be interpreted to be as much a stylistic rule as a structural one: the “effect” could be construed as eldritch horror, farce, philosophical contemplation, whatever. But in fact Poe, both in theory and in practice, understood virtually in the hour of the birth of the short story that it must be constructed around one central point and only one. Like a painting, it must be capable of being taken in at a single glance, although close inspection or repeated viewings would reveal complexities and subtleties not immediately perceptible.

  Thus Poe, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” say, builds his story around the strange bond linking Roderick Usher and his sister, Lady Madeline. The baroque details of the story, rich and vivid, serve entirely to tell us that the Ushers are very odd people and something extremely peculiar has been going on in their house, and ultimately the truth is revealed. There are no subplots, but if there had been (Roderick Usher’s dispute with the local vicar, or Lady Madeline’s affair with the gardener, or the narrator’s anxiety over a stock-market maneuver), they would have had to be integrated with the main theme or the story’s power would have been diluted.

  Similarly, in Guy de Maupassant’s classic “The Piece of String,” one significant thing happens: Maitre Hauchecorne sees a piece of string on the ground, picks it up, and puts it in his pocket. As a result he is suspected of having found and kept a lost wallet full of cash, and he is driven to madness and an early death by the scorn of his fellow villagers. A simple enough situation, with no side-paths, but Maupassant manages, within a few thousand words that concentrate entirely on M. Hauchecorne’s unfortunate entanglement, to tell us a great many things about French village life, peasant thrift, the ferocity of bourgeois morality, and the ironies of life in general. A long disquisition about M. Hauchecorne’s unhappy early marriage or the unexpected death of his neighbor’s grandchild would probably have added nothing and subtracted much from the impact of the story.

  H. G. Wells, who towards the end of the nineteenth century employed the medium of the short story to deal with the thematic matter of what we now call science fiction—and did it so well that his stories still can hold their own with the best s-f of later generations—refined Poe’s “single effect” concept with special application to the fantastic:

  The thing that makes such imaginations [i.e., s-f themes] interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. Then it becomes human. “How would you feel and what might not happen to you?” is the typical question, if for instance pigs could fly and one came rocketing over a bridge at you. How would you feel and what might not happen to you if suddenly you were changed into an ass and couldn’t tell anyone about it? Or if you suddenly became invisible? But no one would think twice about the answer if hedges and houses also began to fly, or if people changed into lions, tigers, cats, and dogs left and right, or if anyone could vanish anyhow. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.

  Right on the mark. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen. The science-fiction story is at its best when it deals with the consequences, however ramifying and multifarious, of a single fantastic assumption. What will happen the first time our spaceships meet those of another intelligent species? Suppose there were so many suns in the sky that the stars were visible only one night every two thousand years: what would that night be like? What if a twentieth-century doctor suddenly found himself in possession of a medical kit of the far future? What about toys from the far future falling into the hands of a couple of twentieth-century kids? One single wild assumption; one significant thing has happened, and it’s a very strange one. And from each hypothesis has come great science fiction: each of these four is a one-sentence summary of a story included in the definitive 1970 anthology of classics of our field, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

  I think it’s an effective way to construct a story, though not necessarily the only effective way, and in general I’ve kept the one-thing-happens precept in mind through more than fifty years of writing them. The stories collected here, written between August of 1987 and May of 1990, demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities. Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my “To the Promised Land” is built around two speculative
fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocketships to other worlds. But in fact we’ve sent plenty of rocketships to other worlds by now, so only my story’s alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it’s the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story.

  Three of the stories in this book, “In Another Country,” “We Are for the Dark,” and “Lion Time in Timbuctoo,” are actually not short stories at all, but novellas—a considerably different form, running three to five times as long as the traditional short story. The novella form is one of which I’m particularly fond, and one that I think lends itself particularly well to science-fiction use. But it too is bound by the single-effect/single-assumption Poe/Wells prescriptions. A novel may sprawl; it may jump freely from character to character, from subplot to subplot, even from theme to countertheme. A short story, as I’ve already shown, is best held under rigid technical discipline. But the novella is an intermediate form, partaking of some of the discursiveness of the novel yet benefiting from the discipline of the short story. A single startling assumption; the rigorous exploration of the consequences of that assumption; a resolution, eventually, of the problems that those consequences have engendered: the schema works as well for a novella as it does for a short story. The difference lies in texture, in detail, in breadth. In a novella the writer is free to construct a richly imagined background and to develop extensive insight into character as it manifests itself within a complex plot. In a short story those things, however virtuous, may blur and even ruin the effect the story strives to attain.

  One story in this collection is neither fish nor fowl, and I point that out for whatever light it may cast on these problems of definition. “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another” may be considered either a very short novella or a very long short story, but in my mind it verges on being a novella without quite attaining a novella’s full complexity, while at the same time being too intricate to be considered a short story. Its primary structure is that of a short science-fiction story: one speculation is put forth. (“What if computers were capable of creating artificial-intelligence replications of famous figures of history?”) But because Pizarro and Socrates are such powerful characters, they launch into an extensive dialog that carries the story far beyond the conventional limits of short fiction—without, however, leading it into the complexities of plot that a novella might develop.

  And yet I think the story, whatever it may be, is a success—an opinion backed by the readers who voted it a Hugo for best novelette the year after it was published. The credit, I think, should go to Socrates and Pizarro, who carry it all along. As a rule, I think it’s ordinarily better to stick to the rules as I understand them. But, as this story shows, there are occasions when they can safely be abandoned.

  Writing novels is an exhausting proposition: months and months of living with the same group of characters, the same background situation, the same narrative voice, trying to keep everything consistent day after day until the distant finish line is reached. When writing a novel, I always yearned for the brevity and simplicity of short-story writing. But then I would find myself writing a short story, and I felt myself in the iron clamp of the disciplines that govern that remorseless form, and longed for the range and expansiveness of novel-writing. I have spent many decades now moving from one extreme of feeling to the other, and the only conclusion I can draw from it is that writing is tough work.

  So is reading, sometimes. But we go on doing it. Herewith are ten stories long and short that illustrate some of my notions of what science fiction ought to have been attempting in the later years of the twentieth century. Whether they’ll last as long as those of Poe and Wells is a question I’d just as soon not spend much time contemplating; but I can say quite certainly that they would not have been constructed as they were but for the work of those two early masters. Even in a field as supposedly revolutionary as science fiction, the hand of tradition still governs what we do.

  —Robert Silverberg

  THE DEAD MAN’S EYES

  A crime story, one of the few I’ve ever written. Crime fiction has never interested me as a reader, let alone as a writer. I’ve read the Sherlock Holmes stories with pleasure, yes, and some Simenons, and in 1985 I suddenly read seven or eight Elmore Leonard books in one unceasing burst. But such acknowledged masters of the genre as P.D. James or John D. MacDonald inspire only yawns in me, which is not to say that they aren’t masters, only that the thing they do so well is a thing that basically does not speak to any of my concerns. Doubtless a lot of mystery writers feel the same way about even the best science fiction. “The Dead Man’s Eyes” isn’t a detective story, but it is crime fiction, to the extent that it seems actually to have been in the running for the Edgar award given out by the Mystery Writers of America. It’s also science fiction, though, built as it is around a concept of detection that exists today only as the wildest speculation.

  I wrote it in a moment of agreeable ease and fluency in the summer of 1987, and Alice Turner of Playboy bought it in an equally uncomplicated way and published it in her August, 1988 issue. I’m never enthusiastic about complications, but the summer is a time when I particularly like everything to go smoothly. This one did.

  ——————

  On a crisp afternoon of high winds late in the summer of 2017 Frazier murdered his wife’s lover, a foolish deed that he immediately regretted. To murder anyone was stupid when there were so many more effective alternatives available; but even so, if murder was what he had to do, why murder the lover? Two levels of guilt attached there: not only the taking of a life but the taking of an irrelevant life. If you had to kill someone, he told himself immediately afterward, then you should have killed her. She was the one who had committed the crime against the marriage, after all. Poor Hurwitt had been only a means, a tool, virtually an innocent bystander. Yes, kill her, not him. Kill yourself, even. But Hurwitt was the one he had killed, a dumb thing to do and done in a dumb manner besides.

  It had all happened very quickly, without premeditation. Frazier was attending a meeting of the Museum trustees to discuss expanding the Hall of Mammals. There was a recess; and because the day was so cool, the air so crystalline and bracing, he stepped out on the balcony that connected the old building with the Pilgersen Extension for a quick breather. Then the sleek bronze door of the Pilgersen opened far down the way and a dark-haired man in a grubby blue-gray lab coat appeared. Frazier saw at once, by the rigid set of his high shoulders and the way his long hair fluttered in the wind, that it was Hurwitt.

  He wants to see me, Frazier thought. He knows I’m attending the meeting today and he’s come out here to stage the confrontation at last, to tell me that he loves my famous and beautiful wife, to ask me bluntly to clear off and let him have her all to himself.

  Frazier’s pulse began to quicken; his face grew hot. Even while he was thinking that it was oddly old fashioned to talk of letting Hurwitt have Marianne, that, in fact, Hurwitt had probably already had her in every conceivable way, and vice versa, but that if now he had some idea of setting up housekeeping with her—unbelievable, unthinkable!—this was hardly the appropriate place to discuss it with him, another and more primordial area of his brain was calling forth torrents of adrenaline and preparing him for mortal combat.

  But no: Hurwitt didn’t seem to have ventured onto the balcony for any man-to-man conference with his lover’s husband. Evidently he was simply taking the short cut from his lab in the Pilgersen to the fourth-floor cafeteria in the old building. He walked with his head down, his brows knitted, as though pondering some abstruse detail of trilobite anatomy, and he took no notice of Frazier at all.

  “Hurwitt?” Frazier said finally when the other man was virtually abreast of him.

  Caught by surprise, Hurwitt looked up, blinking. He appeared for a moment not to recognize
Frazier. For that moment, he was frozen in mid-blink, his unkempt hair a dark halo about him, his awkward rangy body off balance between strides, his peculiar glinting eyes flashing like yellow beacons. In fury, Frazier imagined this man’s bony nakedness, pale and gaunt, probably with sparse ropy strands of black hair sprouting on a white chest, imagined those long arms wrapped around Marianne, imagined those huge knobby fingers cupping her breasts, imagined that thin-lipped wide mouth covering hers. Imagined the grubby lab coat lying crumpled at the foot of the bed and her silken orange wrap beside it. That was what sent Frazier over the brink, not the infidelities themselves, not the thought of the sweaty embraces—there was plenty of that in each of her films, and it had never meant a thing to him, for he knew it was only well-paid make-believe—and not the rawboned look of the man or his uncouth stride or even the manic glint of those strange off-color eyes, those eerie topaz eyes, but the lab coat, stained and worn, with a button missing and a pocket flap dangling, lying beside Marianne’s discarded silk. For her to take such a lover, a pathetic, dreary poker of fossils, a hollow-chested laboratory drudge—no, no, no—

  “Hello, Loren,” Hurwitt said. He smiled amiably; he offered his hand. His eyes, though, narrowed and seemed almost to glow. It must be those weird eyes, Frazier thought, that Marianne has fallen in love with. “What a surprise, running into you out here.”

  And stood there smiling, and stood there holding out his hand, and stood there with his frayed lab coat flapping in the breeze.

  Suddenly, Frazier was unable to bear the thought of sharing the world with this man an instant longer. He watched himself as though from a point just behind his own right ear as he went rushing forward, seized not Hurwitt’s hand but his wrist, and pushed rather than pulled, guiding him swiftly backward toward the parapet and tipping him up and over. It took perhaps a quarter of a second. Hurwitt, gaping, astonished, rose as though floating, hovered for an instant, began to descend. Frazier had one last look at his eyes, bright as glass, staring straight into his own, photographing his assailant’s face; and then he went plummeting downward.